Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Back to 1965 (and 1950)

As I've mentioned a few times over the past few months, I'm currently starting work on developing recipes for my second cookbook. My first book, Cookin' Crunk, will be out soon (this summer!), but there's no time like the present to get started on the next, right? Especially since the theme focuses on food from the past.

I'm veganizing retro recipes by the decade, and last night, I focused on 1965 with two vegetable sides veganized from the Better Homes & Gardens Vegetable Cookbook and a main course that I found on a website dedicated to recipes of the 1950s.

I veganized a recipe for Pan-fried Cabbage that called for four slices of bacon. Instead, I used bacon bits in this caramelized cabbage dish. The result was smoky and delicious:

And I also veganized Beets in Sour Cream. Look at that awesome pink color!

The recipe basically called for heating cooked beets in a mixture of dairy sour cream, scallions, and spices. It sounded intriguing and very retro, so I used Tofutti Sour Cream to make this. Weird as it may sound, this was a delicious method for cooking beets. Very unlike anything I've had before.

That main course was Oven-Baked Cornflake Chicken, so I made Oven-Baked Cornflake Tofu instead:

It's still a work in progress, however. The taste is spot-on since I used my standard tofu chicken marinade, but I need to find a better method for getting the cornflakes to stick. Since they're heavy, my usual dip-tofu-in-soymilk-thickened-with-vinegar method didn't work. So I got all crazy and tried thickening soymilk with cornstarch over low heat until it made a gravy. Then I brushed the gravy on and pressed in the cornflake mix.

The cornflakes stuck beautifully! But the gravy layer got a little chewy in the oven. I'm open to suggestions if anyone knows a great way to make a heavy breading stick to tofu.

9 comments:

i get breadcrumbs to stick by mixing some vegenaise and spices and slathering it on the tofu and then dipping it in the breading... it alters the taste tho (yuM), so i'm not sure it's what you're going for!

Those two sides were created the same year I entered the world. :) I love cabbage so that dish looks great but the beets in sour cream looks like something I must try! I'm very excited for this new book (and your first one, too!)

Tofu in cornstarch, then vegan mayo thinned with a little plant milk) try the new Earth Balance Mayo - it's thicker and "clings" better - and THEN your heavier breading (corflakes, nuts, breadcrumbs, panko).Seems to work well for me.